Lewis On Top: The High Freaks Storm To First Place Of Amazon's Bestseller List

First HFTs took over capital markets courtesy of "legal" orderflow frontrunning which is, for the sixth years in a row, confused with "providing liquidity", and which has allowed such pending IPOs as Virtu to boast 1237 profitable trading days out of 1238 while making their owners multi-billionaires. And now, courtesy of Michael Lewis, the high freaks have also taken over the Amazon bestselling books list.

And just like that, virtually everyone now i) knows the markets are rigged and ii) has an adverse opinion of the collocated "New Normal" vacuum tubes known affectionately as the High Freaks. (Incidentally, just the way the Goldman-supported IEX dark pool and apparently the FBI wanted it).

Perhaps now may be a good time for Virtu to shelve its IPO. Due to "market waking up to HFT criminality conditions."

...how about a book from a ZH lurker? (With my limited budget, I cannot miss an opportunity for self-promotion.)

The blurb for the book goes like this:

For the 95 percent of currency traders that fail to make it rich, come and join a fellow sufferer for a week of ups and downs.

For Pip’s Sake! will leave you nodding in agreement at how the currency markets often confuse. Angry at how the political and economic industries leave you last in the queue. Laughing at how the author haplessly tries to become part of the 5 percent club.

Readable with Kindles, For Pip’s Sake! can also be read on iPads, PCs, Macs, Blackberries, iPhones, Android devices, and goodness knows what else, by using the following application (link).

The book is available at your local Amazon account… with a free sample offered to those averse to personal expenses.

First of all, the vast majority of Ameritards hasn't read a single book in the last five years, and expect it to get worse --- their attention spans shrink by the minute!

They will listen to the "official pundits" from Brookings, or Heritage or Hoover or Cato or Peterson or American Enterprise (all the stink tanks) pontificate on Lewis' book, being far too ignorant and stooopid to grasp that Lewis is the typical misdirection specialist, claiming that, like that bullcrap on 60 Minutes the other night, a farce which has spiked every accurate program before it made it onto the air, the problem is the microsecond insider knowledge they have on the HFT, thanks to MORA (FPGA programming) and their complex events processing platforms!

Now, the vast majority of the rigging of the retail stock market derives from their Internalization Business (with the top banks and the top hedge funds, usually owned by the top banks, BTW, being the Internalizers).

The remainder derives from the virtual naked shorting from the DTCC's Stock Borrow Program.

Actually Tyler said exactly that about six months ago if memory serves me right. And he wasn't quoting Ghandi either.

But on a more serious note I guess I need to resurrect the /sarc tag again. There was a time not so long ago when sarcasm was obvious, especially when it was done by well known posters/commenters. Those were the days my friend, I thought they'd never end. ;-). /sarc

You know Irene has good margin in place behind all her bids and located the borrow for all naked shorts; she's just quick about wiring money and getting compares to clean her skirts. Silly, stupid boys.

So, HFT's are being set up as the fall guy for the next crash to deflect attention away from the FED, the real market riggers. How does Michael Lewis fit in to this? He just decided to write a book about it at a very beneficial time? I love his books, but this is a little ponderous.

The Big Short - publish year 2010. Premise credit default swaps and ginormous profit realized by Michael Burry's hedge fund in late 2008.

Flash Boys - Interestingly, there's no real abrupt black swan yet to occur with this issue of HFT. It has only become really somewhat mainstream since the flashcrash of May 2010. Even still, when has anyone on ZH ever heard about the profits garnered from HFT in the news other than the mouth-pieces that talk nothing but good of it? This book is Lewis' most precient as the final chapter has yet been written (we can all guess how this probably ends).

I agree with you in the sense that this book will greatly raise the awareness of the market-gaming that is HFT.

Maybe it's weird, but when one considers the timing between sitting down to put finger to keyboard, then editing, then having his agent sell to a publisher, then final editing and proofreading, then actually getting it into print...the entire process is years. Even between final draft and in-the-bookstores is about 18 months, 12 tops. Lewis tends to be at the ready when public awareness and interest begin to peak. That's a pretty good skill to have if one wants to be a successful author. Once is serendipity; three or four times is a trend. He also has enough of a persona to get really good gigs when it's time for the dog-and-pony show/promotional tour, such as a segment on 60 Minutes. Kudos to him.

Lewis writes in an accessible manner, and he also has a delicious sense of the absurd. I recommended "Boomerang" to my father, who was never a Wall Street type, and he blew through it in a day and got a good many laughs out of the experience.

You've nailed it without understanding it; Lewis, like Kevin Philips, Noam Chomsky, Jeremy Rifkin (and a bunch of those phoney "corporate environmentalists") are redirection or misdirection specialists, which it took myself and a number of other volunteer-type social activists many years to comprehend!

When Lewis wrote of the recent global economic meltdown, he referenced as his super-heroine a former student, and her thesis on CDO counterparties, at Harvard, whose advisor was the legendary Martin Feldstein (Lewis' words, never mine --- and if unfamiliar with Feldstein, just look up the crimes committed when he was a director at Eli Lilly and HCA and, oh yeah, AIG/Financial Products.

Feldstein was the dood at NBER always pumping out those phony job and economy stats, also.

No, the meltdown did not occur the way Lewis would have everyone believe, which was why his books always get so much play, and his featured Harvard grad super-heroine went on to do nefarious deeds at Morgan Stanley.

IEX propritary technology is they stopped running their orders though BATS. This stuff happenes every five years. And people know what is going on. This happened with Island's exchange and their brokerage DATEK. Roughly the same scam just a new day.

It's nice to see a book for the public being printed. Reading economics blogs for the last decade has made pretty clear to me what High Frequency Trading is all about. When Wall-Street started looking for the best and brightest from the worlds of Physics and math, you knew they were looking for a way to skim. The laws of Physics which drive everything in the universe are very capable of beign turned loose on the problems of trading systems and how they can be gamed. In the end, it is all a very intensely scientific way of front running all markets, of putting gatekeep in the way of all market activity, a gate keeper who must be paid a skim for every activity in the market. It's legal and those who hired the best scientists and compter science folks are reaping utold profits, while mains treet economy sinks into a black hole of a failure to invest in the future and failure to invest in American based business enterprise. Worse than Wall-Street perhaps, are the evil banker class of the city of London. Laundering drug money, sex slave profits, organized kidnapping businesse's profits. Using skimming and free zirp loans from the BoE to organize vast theft operations across the entire Market Systems on the EU and Britain. Yet, these are the people politicians answer to, the people whose agenda the politicians regard as their clients. Nothing is changing, it is jst getting worse. Market players like the little guys are simply chumps to be skimmed and screwed up the ass till they can no longer walk a straight line. Instead of cleaning up the crimes, politicians have ginned up a war against Russia as a destraction. And of course we buy into it.

If you saw the movie, Margin Call with Kevin Spacey and Jeremy Irons there is a part where Paul Betteny of the new Star Trek fame, Spock, is explaining how he knows they are way over the line in the risk of their investments. When asked what he majored in he says he is basically a rocket scientist.He is applying the same equations it is all just mathematics when you come down to it. It's just that banking pays way better than being a scientist. That in a nut shell is what is wrong with America. Glorified blood suckers. At least athletes are creating some kind of enjoyable aversion for those who care to part with their money to watch them. Definitely overpaid, but people choose to part with their money to see them. Bankers fucking steal it from you in the night. Fucking traitorous pieces of shit.

Scott Patterson's "Dark Pools" is highly recommended and an excellent history of HFT starting with Josh Levine's Island ECN exploits. Not only does it blow the lid off HFT and shady exotic order types, it's also well written and VERY entertaining...

Does this mean Lewis might be the next "nail gun" victim, and Steve Kroft will have to go into hiding???

GS and JPM will need to blame the abrupt change in market behavior on something even if this airing on CBS was all appropriately timed for a potential big drop!

Anybody been hearing about large deployments of U.S. Navy and Marines getting ready to head East? Looks like Johnny Heinz 67 and his puppeteers are getting ready to pull "the ripcord", along with the Markets...

Start WWIII even when it's your own fault for creating the economic mess that destroyed your economy for the past two decades???

Damn straight!!...

We'd rather start a World War and blame someone else (even if it is our fucking fault) that will kill potentially billions than accept responsibility for our own actions!

Sure hope the boyz and girlz ready to fight and die for it understand that point!

This guy's a hack. Today on NPR he said we shouldn't put any of these Wallstreetsters in jail because it would hamper financial innovation. He used to work at Salomon Brothers and then left to write a book on the shenanigans that went on there. Looks like he is still working for his friends. If he really was for the retail investor, he would want the whole lot behind bars.

Indeed. In his "Travels in the New Third World" he was blaming the Greek Joe six packs for the country's default because they were evading taxes. You know, because that country got effed due to insufficient tax revenue and not due to decrepit governement policies.

Lewis has always been a misdirection specialist, from the time he was paid to write that book and bring about a change at Salomon, to all his other books of misdirection (see previous comments of mine on this blog posting, please).

Just as Simon Johnson, former stooge for the IMF, goes around the country and sometimes claims naked swaps are BAD, and other times claims they are SUPER-GOOOOD, and gives endless talks claiming the Rockefeller family gave away all their money, they actually gave away none which they didn't profit from, and what they "donated" was less than their multitude of tax breaks (ever wonder why the top landowners in America were behind the conservation movement --- just check out those monies, not even breaks, but direct payments, they receive from the US Government, i.e., our tax base, for their land being declared conserved lands, and wetlands, and all those other various "rights" like water rights, and air rights, and mineral rights, etc., etc. etc.) from those donations from their foundations where they hide their ownership and wealth.

As long as the stock markets keep edging up, high frequency traders will make their few pennies a share profit. Pennies add up. But if the Fed eases up and the stock markets take a dive, will those HFT firms continue to make a steady income stream? Eventually, the Fed will max out its credit card, even if owns the credit card company.

Obviously rigged and dysfunctional, as in intellectually bankrupt and challenged ponzi markets, are only just one sort of rotten apple in the putrid barrel, for here is news and court evidence of more that is not as it seems and seemly, and rotten to its sub-prime cores.

All is not entirely lost though, for such does so ever so conveniently provide they who and/or that which knows what it is doing and what needs to be done in failed and failing sectors, with all the ammunition that IT and/or they need to collapse and rebuild systems in a completely new and different better beta configuration of ITs/their own making. And pity the fool and useless tool that would bet against IT and not help them.

The development and use of surveillance technologies will be one of the defining issues of our times. The reach of these capabilities is astonishingly broad. Governments can listen in on cell phone calls, use voice recognition to scan mobile networks, read e-mails and text messages, sensor web pages, track a citizen's every movement using GPS, and can even change e-mail contents en route to a recipient. They can secretly turn on webcams built into personal laptops and microphones and cell phones not being used. And all of this information can be filtered and organized on such a massive scale that it can be used to spy on every person in an entire country. …. http://cryptome.org/2014/03/hammond-065.pdf

… which be from the sentencing transcript of United States [Secret Private and Pirate Conspiring Entities] of America versus Jeremy Hammond, which goes on to further fully share the lucrative opportunities which abound in ITs burgeoning intelligence surveillance and capture field with the following few gems ……

Professor Ludlow writes that "Jeremy Hammond's exploratory hacks helped expose the scope and nature of the private intelligence industry. Along the way he exposed a well-organized and well-funded system of deception and targeting American citizens and other populations worldwide. He showed that the deceptions were systematic, sometimes illegal, and oftentimes nothing more than extraordinarily disturbing.

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"Few people realize that in addition to the familiar U.S. government intelligence agencies-- the FBI, the NSA and the CIA-- and military intelligence operations, there are also a number of private intelligence corporations, a sector of the intelligence community that was not well known, but was massive in its scope.

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“Tim Shorrock, author of Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing, cites government estimates that by 2006 $42 billion of the $60 billion spent annually by the United States government on foreign and domestic intelligence was going to private intelligence firms, meaning that about 70 percent of the money spent on intelligence was being outsourced to entities over which the American public had no ability to learn. This also means that most of the intelligence activities take place outside of the oversight that governments have put in place lo these many years, oversights that apply to the CIA, the NSA and the FBI. And of course the American U.S. government is far from the only customer of these services. They also provide intelligence services to multi-national corporations and lobbying groups.”

Have a nice day, y'all. And cheer up. SMARTR IntelAgent Systems and Global Operating Devices are working on IT for you too and not just for themselves in SISter Reality AIMissions in the Live Operational Virtual Environments which can be Presented from Creative CyberSpace with Absolute Command and Remote Control of Computers and Communications.

And what price do you imagine that IPO on a rigged and open market place? How many billions/trillions/gazillions/zeroes?

Sorry if I'm being repetitive, but I would like to mention again in this context something I brought up a few weeks ago as a possible means of curtailing HFT. Simply put, whatever happened to trading in pieces of eight?

The HFT algos would not be able to skim much of a prophet if stock prices moved in increments of 12.5 cents, with minimum lot sizes of, say, 500 or so. In effect it would impose cautious value trading on the stock market, reward intelligence and long-term perspective, and perhaps even restore enough respectibility such that ordinary people would be willing to invest again.

Not a panacea, I know, but a good way to help deflate the highly inflated stock market.

I urge anyone wanting a book to look someplace other than Amazon. It is hard to see why Amazon has any fans when you consider how they abuse and exploit the brick and mortar stores that line streets throughout America. These are the stores that employ our family members, support little league teams in the community, and add value to our lives.

Our local brick and mortar stores build or lease space, buy supplies from the other local businesses, and pay both sales and real-estate taxes. Add to this the data collecting and ties with the government and we begin to see how evil the company is to our way of life. More on this subject in the article below.